LAHORIENTALISM

“[NATIVE BELIEVER] is unflinching in its willingness to transgress taboos, whether those taboos are religious, sexual or both. And in the end, “Native Believer” stands as an important contribution to American literary culture: a book quite unlike any I’ve read in recent memory, which uses its characters to explore questions vital to our continuing national discourse around Islam. This is a novel that says (to borrow a line from Aimé Césaire’s “Discourse on Colonialism”), “Any civilization that chooses to close its eyes to its most crucial problems is a stricken civilization.”

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Due out May 3, 2016. Available for purchase via: Amazon B&N

Winemaker & Tavern owner

Dear Tumblr friends. #Falsipedies will connect you to news about my short story collection! Readings in the Bay Area (and others forthcoming).

Latest tweets are about a 1969 short story by Ghulam Abbas, a Pakistani short story writer, who prophecized the rise of Islamism. The story starts with a Pakistani moon-landing.

Name says it all. Check out the link to read more information about the book, including the Table of Contents. People interested in Islamic culture will be particularly intrigued.

The title of the collection is inspired by the "Gymnopedies and Gnossiennes" of the early 20th century Dadaist composer Erik Satie. These were made-up words Satie used to refer to a new type of music.

I am not going to be able to continue with the Lahorientalism project. It simply takes too long to find the requisite Urdu language fonts and then transliterate and save the ghazal as an image file. I am putting the project on indefinite suspension. If anything, my failure to continue simply reaffirms how difficult is the hurdle to sustain Urdu writing online.

Font: al-Qalam Abuzar

Font: Jameel Noori Kasheeda

Font: Attari Kofi Manqash

Font: Khat-e-Sulas Shipped

Font: Jameel Noori Nastaleeq

In the internet age the hundreds of millions of people that write in Urdu (and Shahmukhi Punjabi and many other languages that use non-Western scripts) have been forced to transliterate their languages into Western letters simply because Western technology firms — Apple, Google, Microsoft — do not offer much digital support for these scripts as part of their operating systems. In project LAHORIENTALISM I subject English to that same second-class-digital status. It is English that gets transliterated. It is English that has to fit itself into the alphabet of another language. I have then taken English’s humiliation a step further by writing the English poetry in the form of the Urdu ghazal. -- Ali Eteraz.